Ubisoft’s team up with Red Lynx for Trials of the Blood Dragon gave us a very unexpected game, mashing the popular bike track game with one of Far Cry’s more fabulous spin-offs. Your opinions may vary on how well it works, but now Ubisoft are putting out quite the offer.

There’s a demo for the game available and Ubisoft have laid down the challenge: beat the demo and you get the entire game. 30-missions worth of $15 game. For free.

Of course, there is a slight catch – you need to complete the demo in less than 15 faults and if you’ve ever played a Trials game you know that the game’s tracks and those created by the community love to trip you up by having something move that you don’t expect. So you’d better be good if you wish to own the 80s neon-filled experience without paying out for it. Thank god that the respawn mechanic in Trials is actually pretty quick and uncomplicated.

If you want to take up the mantle and attempt this challenge, you’ve until July 31st to beat the demo and bag a copy. So you’d better get practicing.

Pokemon Go has shot up the charts of mobile downloads to become one of the most popular games out at the moment. Now at the Pokemon Go panel held at San Diego Comic-Con, Niantic’s John Hanke has revealed more about what we can expect for it in the future – and more Pokemon from beyond Gen 1 are a part of that.

Of course, these updates aren’t all going to be coming too soon; after all among the most common things to hear about Pokemon Go are that it’s fun, team rivalry taunts, complaints that someone’s just sniped the gym you were trying to take control of and that the servers are down – again. Among what we can expect beyond the greater choice of catchable Pokemon are trading, Pokemon Centres, and PokeStop customisation.

Unfortunately Hanke has confessed that while its all in development, he can’t give a release date as trying to keep the servers up is the top of the priority list right now as it really ought to be. Centres are still just a concept or idea right now, but the PokeStop customisation is also in the works meaning players might soon be able to build up an area and change functionality of PokeStops through items. Useful if you want your area to be known as a Pokemart for Pokeballs or a Centre if actual Pokemon Centres aren’t actually feasible for Niantic to implement.

Either way, it sounds exciting. I currently can’t play, but I think with only Gen 1 monsters available I’d get a little bored. I’d guess that Gen 2 would be top of the list to come next, but I really look forward to Hoenn’s Pokemon coming to the game.

It seems that people never learn. Commonplace is the death threat online (sadly), but one gamer who made such threats to Blizzard has found himself facing five years in prison for it.

Stephen Cebula, 28, was a player in the Silver bracket of Heroes of the Storm’s ranked ladder system who unfortunately became known for his aggressive harassment of other players. Sending several message’s worth of things such as racial epithets and threats to “bomb the new york twin towers”. Not surprisingly he was reported to Blizz who quickly silenced Cebula to stop his hateful messaging habits. To say Cebula did not take this well would be an understatement.

Sending messages through Facebook, one such message from Cebula’s Facebook threatened the company’s California headquarters saying “You keep silencing me in Heroes of the Storm and I may or may not pay you a visit with an AK 47 amongst some other ‘fun’ tools.”

The messages were reported to the feds and Cebula was arrested after the FBI found several other social media accounts in his control that concerned them, including one apparently named “tedbundyismygod1” – referring to one of America’s most notorious serial killers.

According to court documents from the trial Cebula had admitted that he made the message with the intent to “scare those whom he had threatened”. He is now being held without bail due to having been judged to have ‘significant’ mental issues by the state. Cebula had previously faced psychiatric evaluation before in March of last year when he confessed to Sacramento Sherriff’s Department that had had intentions to kill someone at a local park.

His plea is expected to be entered on the 26th of the month, and right now he is facing a maximum of five years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

Just a lesson for you. Death threats – they’re not funny or cool. Don’t make ’em.

Gears of War 4 is going to be the first game that will supposedly benefit from Microsoft’s newly announced Xbox Play Anywhere initiative, allowing for the ability to cross-buy and cross-play the game on either Xbox or PC. However, to be sure that the PC version doesn’t lose out, it’ll come with a few extra options to make us of the greater option of graphical power and processing speed a PC could offer the game.

Speaking in an interview, The Coalition’s technical director Mike Rayner explained the benefits of Gears on PC for players.

“Support for v-sync tearing has recently come to UWP and we will be able to offer proper unlocked frame-rate support that gamers expect on day one. With Unreal Engine 4 and our own custom modifications, we can take much better advantage of multiple CPU cores, alleviating the game from being CPU-bound and allowing more room for the GPU to shine with enhanced visual quality or higher framerates. Single-player will not be locked to 30fps on PC.”

This means that with the range of tasty settings on offer, you might even be able to fit 60FPS provided everything with UWP works properly with the new support for various options players have been asking for. Among things offered will be a benchmarking tool to help measure FPS, higher resolution textures that could go up to 4K if your machine can handle it and dynamic resolution support and scaling.

Gears of War 4 is planned to release on October 11th of this year, with a beta planned to happen some time before that.

This weekend Industrial Light and Magic have been showing off a load of interesting and shiny toys to do with the Star Wars franchise, at the Star Wars Celebration event that’s been held in London’s ExCel centre. Among the things on show was a VR game/demo called Trials of Tatooine and now its been announced that the game will be made available free to Vive owners from Monday.

The game was co-written by Lucasfilm CTO Rob Bredow and Pablo Hidalgo, keeper of the Star Wars canon. Set in a time just after Luke Skywalker has defeated the Emperor, the Jedi Order is slowly being rebuilt and new hopefuls are being recruited to learn the ways of the Force.

As one of these hopeful padawan learners, you travel to Tatooine, end up aboard the Millenium Falcom and have a familiar astromech droid gift you a lightsaber to use. This is of course the thing that will appeal to fans young and old, and will be used through the experience to reflect blaster fire.

It’s nice to see such a game being made available to adopters of the new VR tech, especially since I dare say it was one of the first things most people thought of when VR started to become a larger thing.